The Political Theater and Theatrical Politics of Andrea Giacinto

Transcript

chapter 9
The Political Theater and Theatrical Politics of
Andrea Giacinto Cicognini: Il Don Gastone di
Moncada (1641)*
Tatiana Korneeva
The dramatic production of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (Florence 1606–1649
Venice) provides a fruitful forum for reflection on the problematics of the political dimension of aesthetics and the aesthetic dimension of politics in the
context of Italian Baroque tragedy. Brilliant and productive playwright and
librettist, author of some forty-five prose tragedies, commedie regie e politiche,
and sacred dramas—as well as of four opera librettos—Cicognini was a man
of remarkable theatrical pedigree1 as well as a courtier par excellence. From his
earliest years, he was closely tied to the Medici court: he was introduced to the
court at the age of seven and thereafter came to be employed as a page boy
thanks to the special interest his godmother, the grand duchess Christine de
Lorraine (1565–1636), took in him.2 Thanks to her patronage, Cicognini gradu-
* This essay was written within the framework of the ‘Early Modern European Drama and the
Cultural Net’ (‘DramaNet’) project, which is funded by the erc Advanced Grant and located
at the Freie Universität Berlin. Special thanks to Amyrose McCue Gill for her valuable editing
and translation assistance.
1 Giacinto Andrea’s father, Jacopo Cicognini (1577–1633), was a poet, playwright, and member
of the Intronati, Instancabili, and Incostanti academies. He may have been a correspondent of
Lope de Vega, who wrote a letter in order to convince his Italian fellow-dramatist that blind
obedience to the regulations laid down by Aristotle’s Poetics was nothing short of foolish.
Although Jacopo refers to Lope’s advice in the preface to his play Il Trionfo di David (written
1628, printed 1633), his direct acquaintance with Lope has been questioned by Maria Grazia
Profeti in her article ‘Jacopo Cicognini e Lope de Vega: “attinenze strettissime”?’, in id. (ed.),
Materiali, variazioni, invenzioni (Florence: Alinea, 1996), pp. 21–31. Legend has it that Jacopo
entrusted his son’s education to Pier Maria Cecchini, a famous Fritellino of the day. For the
most recent account of Cicognini’s life and dramatic production, see Flavia Cancedda and
Silvia Castelli, Per una bibliografia di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini: Successo teatrale e fortuna
editoriale di un drammaturgo del Seicento (Florence: Alinea, 2001), pp. 25–74.
2 Silvia Castelli, ‘Il teatro e la sua memoria: la compagnia dell’Arcangelo Raffaello e il “Don
Gastone di Moncada” di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, in Maria Grazia Profeti (ed.), Tradurre,
riscrivere, mettere in scena (Florence: Alinea, 1996), pp. 85–94, esp. p. 86; Barbara Maranini, ‘Il
© tatiana korneeva, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004323421_011
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc License.
the political theater and theatrical politics of cicognini
261
ated from the University of Pisa with a degree in law; after his father’s death he
decided to pursue the career of a writer while earning his living at court as an
Ufficial d’Onestà, an officer of the Florentine Office of Decency. By autumn 1646,
Cicognini had moved to Venice3 and was participating in the cultural activities
of the Academia degli Incogniti (The Academy of the Incognitos), ‘which functioned as an unofficial seat of political power’.4 It is not surprising, therefore,
that many of his plays’ plots involve political situations and consistently feature
themes touching on kings, royal ministers, courtiers, attendants at court, and
the relationships between a prince and his subjects, and between sovereignty
and individual consciousness. Well-known for adapting and reworking Spanish
comedias of the Siglo de Oro for the Italian stage,5 Cicognini often set his plays
comico nel tragico: I drammi per musica di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, in Alessandro Lattanzi
and Paologiovanni Maione (eds.), Commedia dell’Arte e spettacolo in musica tra Sei e Settecento
(Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, 2003), pp. 185–212, esp. p. 185.
3 Cicognini’s departure from Florence has been attributed to his serious falling-out with some
of the Medici’s protégés, whom he accused of being panderers. See Anna Maria Crinò, ‘Documenti inediti sulla vita e l’opera di Jacopo e Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, Studi secenteschi 2
(1961), 255–286, esp. pp. 258–282.
4 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 37. The membership of the academy, which was founded in
1630 by the patrician Giovan Francesco Loredano, consisted of almost all upper-class Venetian intellectuals of any importance as well as a number of non-Venetians. The Incogniti
were distinguished from other learned academies by their involvement in most aspects of La
Serenissima’s cultural, social, and political life. They were also remarkable for their openness
to unorthodox thinking: they opposed cultural conformism and had a distinct predilection
for licentious living. Prolific writers of prose, moral and religious tracts, and opera librettos,
the members of this powerful academy found their models in the allegorical and satirical
literature inspired by Traiano Boccalini’s socio-political compendium Ragguagli di Parnasso
(Advice from Parnassus, 1612–1614) and expressed their anticonformist views in covert and
highly allusive ways. On the Incogniti, see Monica Miato, L’Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan (1630–1661) (Florence: Olschki, 1998); Lucinda Spera, Due biografie per
il principe degli Incogniti: Edizione e commento della Vita di Giovan Francesco Loredano di Gaudenzio Brunacci (1662) e di Antonio Lupis (1663) (Bologna: I libri di Emil, 2014); Giorgio Spini,
Ricerca dei libertini (Rome: Editrice Universale, 1950). Cicognini was not considered an official
member of the academy, and evidence of his relationship to various members of the Incogniti
is somewhat speculative. For the connections he may have had with the academy after he settled in Venice, see Nunzia Melcarne, ‘Giacinto Andrea Cicognini: Un amico dell’Accademia
veneziana degli Incogniti’, Aprosiana. Rivista annuale di studi barocchi, n.s., 14 (2006), 34–40.
5 There is a burgeoning literature on Cicognini’s role in disseminating Spanish theater in Italy
and on the notable bravura with which he transformed his Spanish sources. See, for example, Fausta Antonucci and Lorenzo Bianconi, ‘Plotting the Myth of Giasone’, in Ellen Rosand
262
korneeva
in the Spanish court—as is, for example, the case with Le gelosie fortunate del
principe Rodrigo, Il principe giardiniero, and Il Don Gastone di Moncada. The
socio-political environments of other European courts also appear in his oeuvre: Norway in L’Adamira, overo La statua dell’honore, Portugal in L’innocente
giustificato, England in La moglie di quattro mariti, Sardegna in Il tradimento per
l’onore, and Poland in La vita è un sogno. Sometimes the courts in Cicognini’s
dramatic works are mythological (Giasone, one of the most enduringly popular
and influential operas of the entire Seicento), historical (Gl’amori di Alessandro Magno e di Rossane), exotic (L’Orontea), or even biblical (La Mariene ovvero
Il maggior mostro del mondo and Iuditta). His characters include highborn
princely protagonists as well as low-ranking commedia dell’arte or graciosolike figures, but even the latter belong without exception to aristocratic court
culture. The court as a state in miniature, as a centre of decision-making and
governance, as a stage for royal and aristocratic representation, and as a social
network thus permeates Cicognini’s plays at a most profound level. Across
the full spectrum of his political plays, we see a playwright exploring different
forms of governance and princely conduct, exposing the unavoidable conflicts
that arise between ethical behavior and the ragion di stato (reason of state,
or national interest),6 and engaging with political practice and seventeenthcentury theories of statecraft.7
(ed.), Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage: Manuscript, Edition, Production (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 201–227; Guelfo Gobbi, ‘Le fonti spagnole del teatro drammatico di
G.A. Cicognini: Contributo alla storia delle relazioni tra il teatro italiano e lo spagnolo del
Seicento’, La biblioteca delle scuole italiane 11, series 3, no. 18 (30 November 1905), 218–222;
no. 19 (15 December 1905), 229–231; no. 20 (31 December 1905), 240–242; Nicola Michelassi and
Salomé Vuelta García, ‘La fortuna del teatro spagnolo a Firenze: Il Don Gastone di Moncada
di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, in Valentina Nider (ed.), Teatri del Mediterraneo: Riscritture e
ricodificazioni tra ’500 e ’600 (Trento: Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento, 2004), pp. 19–
42; Nicola Michelassi and Salomé Vuelta García, ‘Il teatro spagnolo sulla scena fiorentina
del Seicento’, Studi secenteschi 45 (2004), 67–137; Diego Símini, ‘Alcune opere ‘spagnole’ di
Giacinto Andrea Cicognini fra traduzione, adattamento e creazione’, in Paola Andreoli et al.
(eds.), Teatro, scena, rappresentazione dal Quattrocento al Settecento: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Lecce, 15–17 maggio 1997) (Galatina: Congedo, 2000), pp. 305–313. Whereas
Cicognini scholars have focused either on his role in the diffusion of Spanish Golden Age
theater in Italy or on his opera librettos, no attention has been paid thus far to the political
dimension of his dramatic works.
6 The bibliography on the ragion di stato or raison d’État is vast. See, for instance, Artemio Enzo
Baldini and Anna Maria Battista, ‘Il dibattito politico nell’Italia della controriforma: Ragion
di Stato, tacitismo, machiavellismo, utopia’, Il pensiero politico 30 (1997), 394–439; Michael
Stolleis, Stato e ragion di stato nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), pp. 31–68.
7 It is difficult to establish definitively the parameters of Cicognini’s political thought: as was
263
What makes Cicognini’s dramatic production even more interesting for an
investigation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Italian
Baroque tragedy is his versatility and his remarkable ability to adapt himself to rapidly increasing demand for professional entertainment and to the
ravenous theatrical market of the first commercial playhouses and their audiences. Indeed, precisely during his Venetian period (which represents the highpoint of his artistic career), Cicognini brought about the successful ‘encounter
between tragedy and musical drama’8 that was to shape the genre of opera over
the next several hundred years.
Cicognini’s dramatic production, therefore, stands at the intersection of
courtly performance, theater produced by learned academies, and entertainment that was only just starting to see professionalization. It thus permits us
to explore a fundamental set of questions, beginning with how sovereignty is
portrayed in dramas that represent a way station, as it were, in the decisive
transition from absolutist court theater to commercial playhouse.
Taking into account the intense engagement of Baroque drama with the
socio-political life of the communities in which (and for which) it was written, as well as its function as a harbinger—and then diffusive mechanism—
of changing political attitudes, we might also seek to uncover the import of
Cicognini’s tragedies for seventeenth-century audiences. My aim, then, is to
explore the significance of this particular playwright’s works both within the
localized traditions of Italian theater and on a larger European stage.
If we approach Cicognini’s political plays as a product of the supply-anddemand forces of the marketplace and with the active influence of his spectators in mind,9 we may also be able to learn something about the public’s taste in
the case with many of the Incogniti with whom he likely associated, he was too enigmatic a
playwright to express openly his stance on political and ideological matters. Nevertheless,
certain discernible patterns emerge in his dramatic output. In particular, his interest in
politics and in a variety of forms of government suggests that these were central concerns
of his writing career and were not exclusively imposed by a need to please either patrons or
spectators.
8 Federico Doglio, ‘La tragedia barocca’, in id. (ed.), Il teatro tragico italiano: Storia e testi del
teatro tragico in Italia (Parma: Guanda, 1958), pp. lxxix–clxiv, esp. p. cv.
9 Cicognini claimed in the preface ‘A i Lettori, & Spettatori del Drama’ to Giasone that he
composed it on a whim and with no aim other than to delight: ‘Io compongo per mero
capriccio; Il mio capriccio non ha altro fine che dilettare; L’apportar diletto appresso di me,
non è altro che l’incontrare il genio, & il gusto di chi ascolta, ò legge.’ Giasone: Dramma
Musicale del D. Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (Venice: Per il Giuliani. Con Licenza de’ Su. e
Privilegio, 1649), p. 7. The importance of pleasing a wide audience was also a Leitmotiv of
the Incogniti’s literary production.
264
korneeva
theater (or, in other words, their aesthetics), and this leads me to the two final
questions whose answers I will pursue in these pages. First, in what ways did
their performance of sovereignty and the aesthetics of power make Cicognini’s
plays appeal to different kinds of audiences and, therefore, make them portable
to other parts of Italy and across Europe?10 Second, what was it about his writing for theater that caused his plays to remain phenomenally popular into the
eighteenth century?11
A Mixed Tragedy for A Mixed Public: A New Aesthetics of the Tragic
Genre
In order to begin laying bare the relationship between the theatrical stage
and the political culture it served, the following analysis will focus on one of
Cicognini’s political tragedies, Il Don Gastone di Moncada.12 Written during his
Florentine period (though published in 1658, posthumously, as were almost all
his works), it was staged at the public playhouse Baldracca in Florence in 1641.
Il Don Gastone was Cicognini’s most often performed play in Florence during
the grand duchy of Ferdinand ii (1610–1670) and Cosimo iii de’ Medici (1670–
1723), and it is by far one of his best-travelled and dramatically effective works.13
The play’s success was so sensational that it even encouraged its author to write
10
11
12
13
For example, on the performance of Cicognini’s plays in Russia under Peter the Great (and,
in particular, of his Tradimento per l’onore, which was adapted for Russian audiences from
a German translation), see Nikolai Tikhonravov, Russkie dramaticheskie proizvedenia 1672–
1725 godov, 2 vols. (Saint Petersburg: Izdanie D.E. Kozancikova, 1874), i, p. 44 and ii, p. 80.
Symptomatic of the remarkable success, enduring positive reputation, and editorial fortune that Cicognini’s works still enjoyed in the eighteenth century is Carlo Goldoni’s claim
that the Florentine playwright was among his most read and studied dramatic authors:
‘Degli autori di commedie che leggevo e rileggevo spesso, il mio preferito era Cicognini.
Tale autore fiorentino, poco conosciuto nella repubblica delle lettere, aveva scritto molte
commedie d’intreccio, miste di patetico lagrimoso e di comico triviale; eppure vi si trovava
molto interesse: egli aveva l’arte di dosare la sospensione e di suscitare diletto grazie allo
scioglimento. Mi ci appassionai moltissimo, lo studiai attentamente e, a otto anni, osai
abbozzare una commedia’. Goldoni, Memorie, ed. Paolo Bosisio (Milan: Mondadori, 1993),
pp. 29–30.
All citations of the play are from il don | gastone | di moncada | Opera scenica, e
Morale | del dottore | giacinto andrea | cicognini. | [image of vase with flowers]
| in bologna, 1682. | Per Gioseffo Longhi. Con lic. de’ Sup. Translations of the play and of
other sources are mine unless otherwise noted.
Michelassi and Vuelta García, ‘La fortuna del teatro spagnolo’, p. 22.
265
a sequel, Il Celio (written in 1645 and first performed in 1646), which had as its
protagonist Don Gastone’s son Celio. As the preface to Cicognini’s first dramma
per musica states,14 the audience of Il Don Gastone consisted of both privileged
and common playgoers: the play was, according to Cicognini, ‘enjoyed so much
by all’ (‘all’universale così gradito’).15 Subsequently, as Nicola Michelassi and
Salomé Vuelta García have pointed out, ‘Cicognini’s play was performed in
Florence in the most diverse theatrical spaces: from religious confraternities
to public theaters, from noble academies to private houses. Its success was due
to the perfect equilibrium between the subject matter of the work and its scenic
efficacy’.16
Il Don Gastone is set in Spain, and takes place during the rule of the corrupt and decadent tyrant Don Pietro Rè d’Aragona. At the outset of the play,
Don Gastone of Moncada, who is retired from public court life, lives happily
with his loving, faithful wife Donna Violante and devotes his leisure time to
hunting. This peaceful existence is disrupted when the king and Don Merichex
di Buccoì, a nobleman exiled for having avenged a family dishonor, arrive at
Don Gastone’s duchy. The host welcomes the newcomers, generously offering
Don Merichex his protection and hospitality. In the meantime, the king meets
Donna Violante and is immediately so infatuated with her that she becomes
the sole object of his attentions. Ignoring the lady’s resistance to his advances,
the king hatches a plot to pursue her further by inviting the couple and Don
Merichex to return with him to the Aragonese court. Although his attempts
to seduce Donna Violante continue to be rebuffed, Pietro persists in his determination to possess her: he restores Don Merichex’s honor and, in exchange,
requires that he exile his new friend Don Gastone and arrange an amorous
encounter between the lust-filled king and Donna Violante. Don Merichex,
14
15
16
Cicognini, Celio (Florence: Per Luca Francesc. & Alessandro Logi, 1649), p. 10: ‘Insomma, ti
prego a gradire Celio mio se no per altro, almeno perché è figlio del mio Don Gastone, che
è stato all’universale così gradito’ The preface is dedicated to Leopoldo de’ Medici, who
commissioned and promoted the production of Florentine libretti that imitated Venetian
ones. Cf. Nicola Michelassi, ‘La “Finta pazza” a Firenze: commedie “spagnole” e “veneziane”
nel teatro di Baldracca (1641–1665)’, Studi secenteschi, 41 (2000), 313–353, esp. p. 335.
On the social diversity of the spectators at the Baldracca theater, see Nicola Michelassi, ‘La
“Finta pazza”’, p. 315: ‘Baldracca non appare dunque uno stanzone malfamato condannato
alla sterile ripetizione dei lazzi dell’Arte, ma un luogo di irradiamento culturale, pacificamente condiviso da tutte le fasce sociali (compresa l’aristocrazia nobiliare e i principi
medicei, che vi si recavano regolarmente), dove si potevano apprezzare novità spettacolari di portata determinante’.
Michelassi and Vuelta García, ‘La fortuna del teatro spagnolo’, p. 31.
266
korneeva
after debating with himself over the right course of action, appears to obey the
king’s commands: he tells Don Gastone that he is to be exiled by the king and
orchestrates the murder of the couple’s son, Celio, in order to weaken Donna
Violante’s resistance to her unwanted royal suitor. Don Merichex goes even further than the king demanded: he takes it upon himself to invite Don Gastone
and Donna Violante to a farewell dinner during which they are served their dismembered son. Finally, Don Merichex succeeds in arranging the long desired
encounter between the king and Donna Violante. Only at the end of the play
do the characters (and the spectators) learn that Celio is still alive and that
the king spent a night with his neglected wife—not with Donna Violante. Don
Merechex, therefore, only feigned his execution of the tyrant’s orders and did
not betray Don Gastone, his friend. In the end, Don Merechex’s shrewd manipulation of appearances makes the king better understand his obligations to
his people, leads to the re-establishment of order from confusion, and restores
domestic and political stability.
Fausta Antonucci has identified as Il Don Gastone’s possible sources three
plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina.17 With
Calderón’s Gustos y disgustos son nada más que imaginación (Pleasure and Displeasure are Nothing but Imagination, 1638), Cicognini’s drama shares the motif
of a king’s inappropriate desire for a married noblewoman. Unlike Gustos y
disgustos, however, Il Don Gastone places much more emphasis on the problematics of power, the opposition to tyranny, and the courtier’s relationship
to the prince. As for his other potential sources, Cicognini may have derived
the motif of the faithful noblewoman’s resistance to the tyrannical king from
Lope de Vega’s La corona merecida (The Deserved Crown, 1603) and the motif
of friendship between two noblemen as well as the political meaning of their
bond from Tirso de Molina’s Cómo han de ser los amigos (How Friends Should Be,
1612). Antonucci goes on to suggest that Il Don Gastone also recalls the early dramatic works of Guillén de Castro because of the play’s gravity and its moral and
political implications. She argues, therefore, that while Il Don Gastone clearly
embraces sequences, situations, and plot lines taken from several Spanish Siglo
de Oro comedias, the problematics structuring Cicognini’s play are not present
in these sources.18 In contrast with them, in my interpretation, Cicognini gives
centre stage to reflections on tyranny and thoroughly integrates discussions of
politics with the play’s action. Il Don Gastone thus resonates with the political
17
18
Fausta Antonucci, ‘Spunti tematici e rielaborazione di modelli spagnoli nel Don Gastone
di Moncada di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, in Profeti (ed.), Tradurre, riscrivere, mettere in
scena, pp. 65–84.
Ibid., pp. 80–81.
267
themes of its age: the theatricality of royal power, the overriding importance
of appearances at court, the courtier’s relationship to the prince and to other
courtiers, the discourse on civility, and the art of dissimulation.
There is, in fact, good reason to believe that Cicognini’s decision to modify
the plot lines of the plays on which he drew so as to emphasize the political
significance of his narrative was neither random nor casual. The political resonance of Il Don Gastone is heightened by its tragicomic form19—which, in an
Italian context, was itself politically charged if not politically dangerous, as it
offered an alternative to existing systems of government.20 Indeed, Giambattista Guarini, who set a foundational precedent with the publication of Il pastor
fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590), defended the genre of pastoral tragicomedy, with its controversial social mingling of the upper and lower classes, by
comparing it to the mixed political form of the republic, asking rhetorically:
‘Why cannot poetry make the mixture, if politics can do it?’.21 By deploying the
tragicomic form, Cicognini, as we will see, was thus deliberately elaborating a
new aesthetics for a tragic genre that was suited to a mixed audience—a genuine cross-section of the population—that could (and did) identify in complex,
bespoke ways with the social and political conflicts portrayed upon the stage.22
19
20
21
22
The play was defined as an opera spagnola in the Laurenziano manuscript, as an opera
tragicomica in the 1658 editions of Rome (published by Angelo Bernabò dal Verme with
the title Il D. Gastone, overo la più costante tra le maritate. Opera tragicomica) and Perugia
(published by Sebastiano Zecchini with the title Il gran tradimento contra la più costante
delle maritate, overo L’amico traditor fedele: Opera tragicomica), and as an opera scenica
e morale in the 1658 Venetian edition (published by Nicolò Pezzana with the title Il
Don Gastone di Moncada, Opera scenica e morale). On the complex textual tradition and
printing history of the play, see Antonucci, ‘Spunti tematici’, pp. 67–68.
I owe this point to James J. Yoch’s discussion of the political message in Italian tragicomedies. See his ‘The Renaissance Dramatization of Temperance: The Italian Revival of
Tragicomedy and the Faithful Shepherdess’, in Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance
Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: ams Press, 1987), pp. 115–138.
See also Marvin T. Herrick’s still valuable Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy,
France, and England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962).
Giambattista Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1601), in Allan H. Gilbert (ed. and transl.), Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), pp. 505–533, esp. p. 511.
It is worth noting that the Arcadian letterato Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni claimed in 1700
that Cicognini’s creation of a rich impasto of tragedy and comedy was emblematic of the
decline of Italian theater: ‘[…] Giacinto Andrea Cicognini intorno alla metà di quel secolo
con più felice ardimento introdusse i Drammi con suo Giasone, il quale per vero dire è il
primo, e il più perfetto Dramma, che si truovi; e con esso portò l’esterminio dell’Istrionica,
268
korneeva
To return for a moment to Cicognini’s dramaturgical models, it should also
be pointed out that the sententious discourses of the characters, the violent
coups de théâtre, and the vivid horrors of the banquet scene—in which Gastone
and Violante are served the blood and heart of their apparently murdered
son—recalls some aspects of Senecan tragedy, as revived by Giovan Battista
Giraldi.23 Particular prominence given to suspense, the inganno a lieto fine, and
the play’s untroubled resolution all echo the innovative form of the tragedia
di lieto fine created by Giraldi, who justified tragic plots with happy endings,
claiming that events ‘should come about in such a way that the spectators are
suspended between terror and pity until the end, which, with a happy outcome,
should leave everyone consoled’.24 Though Cicognini’s play is also tragicomic,
it does not conform exactly to Giraldi’s mixed-mood form of tragedy (which
depicts the virtuous characters’ escape from their tragic fate as well as the evil
characters’ downfall), since Il Don Gastone ends happily for the villain as well
as for the protagonists.
In sum, what makes Cicognini’s play worthy of our attention is its status as a
product of intense cultural exchange and as an assemblage of different sources,
genres, and dramatic models ranging from Spanish comedias and the native
Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte to Giraldi’s tragedies with happy endings.
In fact, it is the very heterogeneity of Cicognini’s source material that enables
23
24
per conseguenza della ver, e buona Comica, e della Tragica stessa; imperciocchè per maggiormente lusingare colla novità lo svogliato gusto degli spettatori, nauseati ugualmente
la vista delle cose Comiche, e la gravità delle Tragiche, l’inventor de’ Drammi unì l’una e
l’altra in essi, mettendo pratica con mostruosità non pià udita tra Re, ed Eroi, ed altri illustri Personaggi, e Buffoni, e Servi, e vilissimi uomini. Questo guazzabuglio di personaggi fu
cagione del total guastamento delle regole Poetiche, le quali andarono di tal maniera in
disuso, che nò meno si riguardò più alla locuzione […].’ Cf. La bellezza della volgar poesia
spiegata in otto dialoghi (Rome: Buagni, 1700), Dialogo vi, pp. 140–142.
Giovan Battista Giraldi, Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie (Discourse on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies, 1543), in id., Scritti critici, ed. Camillo
Guerrieri Crocetti (Milan: Marzorati, 1973), p. 184: ‘E ancora che Seneca tra i Latini non
abbia mai posta mano alle tragedie di fin felice, ma solo si sia dato alle meste con tanta
eccellenza che quasi in tutte le tragedie egli avanzò (per quanto a me ne paia) nella prudenza, nella gravità, nel decoro, nella maestà, nelle sentenze, tutti i Greci che scrissero
mai […]. Nondimeno noi, n’abbiamo composta alcuna a questa immagine, come l’Altile,
la Selene, gli Antivalomeni e le altre, solo per servire agli spettatori, e farle riuscire più
grate in iscena, e conformarmi più con l’uso dei nostri tempi’.
Ibid., p. 184: ‘Si debbono nondimeno far nascere gli avvenimenti di queste men fiere
tragedie in guisa che gli spettatori tra l’orrore e la compassione stiano sospesi insino al
fine, il qual poscia riuscendo allegro gli lasci tutti consolati’.
269
and results in his ambivalent portrayal of both sovereignty and tyranny. At the
same time as he was influenced by them, however, the playwright seems to have
drawn on this wide range of sources in order to unsettle and, indeed, depart
radically from them. What is striking about Il Don Gastone is that it is critical
throughout in its representation of royal sovereignty, and yet its outcome is
entirely forgiving of the villainous king. We might easily expect otherwise, since
Pietro d’Aragona is characterised as a tyrant right from the outset. In Act i, scene
1—even before the audience is granted their first glimpse of the king—we hear
several comments, mostly negative, about his character. The first of these is
by Scappino, a servant of Don Gastone,25 who explains to another secondary
character that although he has never seen the king in person, it is better to stay
away from him:
Non hò mai visto in viso il Rè d’Aragona perche subito, che andai alla Corte
con D. Gastone m’amalai […]; mà credimi pure, che lo star lontano da lui,
è un star lontano dal Diavolo, perche di Rè non hà se non il nome, l’opere
son da bestia, e da Tiranno.
i.1
(I have never seen the King of Aragon in person because as soon as I went
to court with D. Gastone I fell ill […]. But believe you me: to stay away
from him is to stay away from the Devil, because he has nothing of a King
about him but the title—his deeds are those of a beast and of a Tyrant.)
Later in Act i, Don Gastone (reproaching Scappino for not having recognised
Don Merichex as a nobleman, and thus failing to greet him properly upon
his arrival) is also indirectly critical of the king’s tyrannical rule: ‘whence have
you learned the Doctrine of Tyranny? If you were instructed in such errors at
the Court of Aragon, know that my Duchy is a place where one employs only
respect’ (‘ove imparasti la Dottrina della Tirannide? Se nella Reggia d’Aragona
fosti ammaestrato in cos’ fatti errori, sappi che la mia Ducea è luogo solo ove
s’esercita la pietà’, i.3). In the words of Donna Violante, the king’s court is a ‘vessel of impiety, [a] school of Hell’ (‘ricetto dell’empietà, scuola d’Inferno’, ii.17)
where, according to Scappino, ‘the floor is scorching and the air is pestiferous’
25
Cicognini’s dramatic works and opera librettos (and seventeenth-century Venetian librettos more generally) are replete with comic, clownish, Spanish graciosos-like low-ranking
characters. Their function is to play the role of side-kick to a highborn character, to support primary characters in helper roles, and (as is the case with Scappino) to predict the
deeds of the hero. See Antonucci and Bianconi, ‘Plotting the Myth’, p. 202.
270
korneeva
(‘il pauimento scott[a], e […] l’aria [è] contagiosa’, ii.16). The king of Aragon
clearly stands for an absolutist monarchy gone terribly wrong: he is driven by
impulse, he craves sex and enjoys the reckless pursuit of pleasure, he is indifferent to the rights of his subjects, and he is ruled by blind libido dominandi—the
principal characteristic of tyrants great and small. And yet this decadent and
destructive king is permitted to redeem himself completely at the end of the
play, when he discovers that Don Merichex’s lieto inganno has set right the
king’s private life and, consequently, the affairs of the state.
On the one hand, it is apparent that, far from being mere diletto, Cicognini’s
drama is highly politically charged. On the other hand, however, it not easy
to disentangle mid-Seicento commonplaces about tyranny, bad governance,
and court corruption from what I view as a specifically Cicogninian treatment
of royalty. The following pages will thus attempt to interrogate this central
interpretative challenge in order to show how images of Baroque kingship
change when Cicognini attempts to satisfy not only the prince-as-patron and
privileged playgoers, but also the collective desires of an increasingly large
market and the socially diverse audience of public playhouses, academies, and
religious confraternities.26
The King in Love
Given that Cicognini’s attitude toward his sources was to minimise his dependence on and flaunt his departure from them—and that, as a result, comparing
his play with its sources does not help us unravel the ambiguities inherent in its
portrayal of sovereignty—it may be useful to consider Il Don Gastone within the
specific institutional framework of the court. From Quattro- to Settecento, after
all, the court was the fundamental building block of the European political system and functioned simultaneously as a platform for monarchical representation and for political negotiation. Cicognini’s play is essentially a court-centred
drama, but it is also a play that marks the transition from court to public the-
26
Despite Cicognini’s proximity to the Medici court, the absence of references to his plays
in the court diaries suggests that most of the work he produced between 1630 and 1640
was performed within the framework of the Florentine learned academies and religious
confraternities (Cf. Castelli, Il teatro e la sua memoria, p. 91; Cancedda and Castelli, Per una
bibliografia, pp. 54–55). Situated at the boundaries of the royal court, these assemblies
were distinguished by their acceptance of participants’ social diversity, their flexibility
within an arena removed from royal power, and their ability to articulate new forms of
sociability.
271
ater. German social historian Norbert Elias’s theoretical model of court society
and his account of the civilizing process and the genesis of the modern, bourgeois world can thus provide a promising point of entry for the interpretation
of our Florentine playwright’s dramatic work.
Elias’s central thesis in Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process, 1939)27 is that court society constitutes an important step along the path
from feudal to modern state society; from society based upon physical force
towards society characterized by the restriction of one’s expressions of raw
emotion, the control of affect, the virtue of self-discipline—indeed, precisely
the dictates of early modern court etiquette. He argued that the processes of
state formation and of ‘courtisation’ (especially as expressed in the absolutist
states of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe),28 the growth of administrative infrastructure, and the centralization of taxes and the use of force,
reduced the level of violence between feudal lords—which in turn resulted
in an increased demand for the restraint of aggressive, emotional, and sexual
drives, as well as for the refinement of manners.29 Indeed, Elias maintained
27
28
29
Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939). English translations of this text
are from Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennel, transl. Edmund Jephcott
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
In Elias’s scenario, the civilizing process was most pronounced in the French absolutist
court (The Civilizing Process, pp. 190–191, 205). On the applicability of Elias’s model to
the Italian Baroque court, see Marcello Fantoni, La corte del granduca: Forma e simboli
del potere mediceo fra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), p. 131: ‘Quanto è rilevato
per Firenze contraddice l’ipotesi che il Re Sole sia stato il primo sovrano a fare del
cerimoniale uno strumento di potere. Nonostante che dalla fine del xvii secolo Versailles
assurga a modello europeo, quello descritto da Elias non può quindi definirsi un fenomeno
storicamente originale: i codici comportamentali che improntano la società di corte si
elaborano altrove, ed in un periodo precedente.’ See also Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and
the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009), p. 69: ‘The courts of Europe, which grew in power and number during the early
modern period with the weakening of feudalism and rise of absolutism, drew extensively
on the Italian model at first, only subsequently to surpass it, a process culminating at
Versailles under Louis xiv’.
According to Elias’s paradigm, it is with the arrival of the absolutist court, which took on
the ‘monopoly organization of physical violence’, that ‘[…] individuals learn to control
themselves more steadily; they are now less a prisoner of their passions than before. But
[…] they are much more restricted in their conduct, in their chances of directly satisfying
their drives and passions. Life becomes in a sense less dangerous, but also less emotional
or pleasurable, at least as far as the direct release of pleasure is concerned […]. Physical
272
korneeva
that manuals on the education of princes and manners books—which he saw
as catalysts of the ‘civilizing process’—imposed increasingly severe standards
of control over impulse and fashioned individuals who would fit within the
structures of society by instilling in them ‘a compulsion to check one’s own
behavior’.30 Elias’s observation can be confirmed by (among countless other
examples) a brilliant Baroque moralist, Baltasar Gracián, who claimed in his
Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647) that ‘no
mastery is greater than mastering yourself and your own passions: it is a triumph of the will’. He also pointed out that ‘if one is master of oneself, one will
then be the master of others’.31 It is Elias’s contention that the management
and control of emotion (Affektbeherrschung) and the ability to conceal one’s
true feelings thus functioned simultaneously as an expression and confirmation of differences in status and power.32 In other words, the absolutist court
(the setting in which, according to Elias’s scenario, the transformation of the
individual’s emotional life was the most profound) required that its members
uncouple the outward display of their feelings from their inner emotional state.
Personal interactions within court society were thus characterized by the
norms of ‘court rationality’—that is by a balance ‘between short-term desires
and emotional needs, and the longer-term consequences of human action’.33
What Elias’s landmark analysis of the historical development of self-surveillance makes clear is that the aristocratic court was marked by an almost com-
30
31
32
33
clashes, wars and feuds diminish […] But at the same time the battlefield is, in a sense,
moved within. Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in
the struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being. […]
[A]n individualized pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated, a
specific “super-ego”, which endeavours to control, transform or suppress his or her feelings
in keeping with the social structure’. Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 374–375.
Ibid., p. 70.
Quoted in Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, p. 43.
Elias elaborates on this argument in Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie: Mit einer Einleitung: Soziologie und
Geschichtswissenschaft (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). English translations of this text are
from id., The Court Society, transl. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983): ‘[…] affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate. They reveal the true feelings of the
person concerned to a degree that, because not calculated, can be damaging; they hand
over trump cards to rivals for favour and prestige. Above all, they are a sign of weakness;
and that is the position the court person fears most of all. In this way the competition of
court life enforces a curbing of the affects in favour of calculated and finely shaded behaviour
in dealing with people’, p. 111.
Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 87.
273
plete absence of the distinction between public and private life, since one’s
private feelings came to be turned to the profit and advantage of one’s public
life.
Elias’s hugely influential study provides a viable framework employing
which we might be able to offer a preliminary explanation as to why the king in
Cicognini’s play is characterised as a tyrant. Building on Elias’s insight into the
courtly bonds closely connecting social and power relations, on the one hand,
and interpersonal interactions between individuals with distinct personalities
and dispositions, on the other, it is possible to suggest that Pietro d’Aragona
is defined as a tyrant because he is ruled by unbridled emotion and the reckless pursuit of pleasure. Indeed, in describing his feelings after encountering
Donna Violante for the first time, the king demonstrates clearly that, far from
being motivated by the norms of ‘court rationality’, he is ruled by passion and
self-interest:
Venni, viddi, e persi, venni à far preda, e fui predato, viddi quella beltade,
che in un punto m’accese, arse, & incenerì, persi, ò Cielo, persi il core, è
potente un Rè, dà la vita, e la toglie, mà più potente è la bellezza, che toglie
la vita sì, mà per miracolo d’amore la può ridonnare; son morto, ò miei fidi,
tutti gli Scettri, tutte le Monarchie non mi possono ravvivare, mà la beltà
di colei è l’ultimo rimedio all’amoroso mio male.
i.10
(I came, I saw, and I was conquered; I came to be a predator and was
preyed upon; I saw that beauty that, in an instant, inflamed, burned, and
incinerated me; I lost—Oh Heaven!—I lost my heart! A King is powerful,
he gives life and he takes it, but yet more powerful is beauty that, yes, takes
life, but because of the miracle of love can also give back life. I am dead,
oh my faithful subjects! Neither all the Sceptres nor all the Kingdoms can
revive me—naught but her beauty is the final cure for my love-suffering.)
It is thus his neglect of the core principle of the interdependence of social
structures and human interactions, as well as his willingness to seek base
pleasure at the expense of his courtiers’ honour, that mark Pietro as a despot.
This is made especially evident when we note that the king uses words most
often confined to the political sphere and to war (his ‘venni, viddi, e persi,
venni à far preda’ explicitly recalls Caesar’s ‘veni, vidi, vici’), relocating them
within the sphere of private emotion. Indeed, the king’s claim that he alone
has the right to possess a woman who, in fact, belongs to another man (‘only I
am permitted to desire her and to pursue her, because only an Eagle can look
274
korneeva
straight at the Sun’; ‘à me solo è lecito il desiderarla, e conseguirla, perche lice
all’Aquila sola fissarsi al Sole’, i.10), reveals that he is unable to suppress his own
self-interest for the greater good of the community and that he prioritises his
individual pleasure above the interests of his subjects.34 The process of pursuit
reveals the dangerously seductive power a prince has, namely the power to
follow his passions without fear of opposition or sanction:
Sono il Rè, ò son l’ombra? Son Vassallo, ò Signore? Più dunque può l’ostinazione d’una femina, che la mia autorità? Don Merichex, già che il
sangue del figlio ucciso non fu bastante à piegare l’animo di Donna Violante, adoprisi pur la violenza, così felicitando me se stesso in Amore,
farò anco conoscere à lei che un Rè è Padrone della vita, dell’honore, e
dell’arbitrio ancora.
iii.8
(Am I King or shadow? Am I Vassal or Lord? Is the stubbornness of a
woman more potent than my authority? Don Merichex, given that the
blood of her murdered son was not enough to subdue the soul of Donna
Violante, let us resort to further violence. In this way, I will make myself
happy in Love and I will also make her learn that a King is the Master of
life, of honour, and even of will.)
If, to continue to employ Elias’s sociological perspective, court society was
based on ‘courtly rationality’ as well as on the absence of a distinction between
private and public life, it is reasonable to suggest that Cicognini’s king is portrayed as a tyrant precisely because he allows his private feelings to overwhelm
his public role: the sovereign’s uncontrolled, undisciplined private body here
takes centre stage, illustrating by analogy the ineptness of a body politic under
tyrannical control.
The King’s Failed Performance
At this point, it will be helpful to make use of Elias’s account of the rationalization of human conduct (which he places in the category of the ‘civilizing pro-
34
From this point of view, the queen’s accusation of her husband is also revealing: ‘I tuoi
gusti hanno hauuto sempre per fine il tuo sfrenato piacere, il tormento della moglie, la
vergogna d’altrui’, iii.17.
275
cess’) alongside his theoretical model of early modern European courts elaborated some years earlier in Die höfische Gesellschaft (The Court Society, written
1933; published 1969).35 Elias argued that the growth of civilization and the
establishment of the court as a socio-political configuration did not straightforwardly cause domestic pacification among the élite. Instead, it transformed
social, economic, and political confrontations that had previously been won or
lost by means of brute force into symbolic struggles in which both weapons
and spoils were replaced by political acts. This new kind of representation
meant that political gains and losses came simultaneously to be substitutions
for and external manifestations of violence. In contrast to bourgeois-capitalist
societies (where the exercise of power revolves around the acquisition of economic capital), in early modern royal courts the exercise of power required
the acquisition of symbolic capital, namely status and prestige.36 Its members
were therefore engaged in continuous small-scale competitive maneuvering
for social advantage, power, and prestige in their efforts to secure or protect
their status. This meant that king and courtiers were interdependent, as each
used the other to reaffirm his (or her) position within a strict hierarchical order.
Court ceremonies and etiquette were the vehicles used for expressing this interdependence: the king employed them as a means of emphasizing his unique
position and his social distance from his courtiers; the courtiers employed
them to display their own status within the hierarchical order of the court. As
Robert van Krieken, commenting on Elias’s model, explains, ‘in court society,
individual existence and identity were profoundly representational—they consisted of how one exhibited one’s position and status to everyone else, and this
process of exhibition and performance was highly competitive and constantly
fluctuating’.37 In other words, the successful conduct of courtly life depended
upon the offstage equivalent of theatrical role-playing.
A brief comparison with Baldassare Castiglione’s much translated and often
reprinted Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), a major contributor to the ‘civilizing process’, illustrates the point. In the Cortegiano, Castiglione emphasizes the importance to the courtier of both appearances and
making a good impression (‘imprim[ere] bona opinion di sé’, i.16).38 He was
35
36
37
38
Although The Court Society was published after The Civilizing Process (1969, in German;
1983, in English), Elias wrote it in 1933 and it thus anticipates the subsequent development
of his ideas in The Civilizing Process.
See Elias, The Court Society, esp. chap. iv, ‘Characteristics of the court-aristocratic figuration’, pp. 66–77.
Van Krieken, Norbert Elias, p. 88.
Baldassar Castiglione, Il Libro del cortegiano, ed. Giulio Carnazzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010),
276
korneeva
well aware that, by presenting his readers with an image of the perfect courtier,
he was instructing them in the art of wearing different masks on different occasions (‘vestirsi un’altra persona’, ii.19). The Cortegiano thus teaches its readers
to produce and maintain an image of themselves that allows (indeed encourages) others to view it as a continuous aesthetic performance. For Castiglione,
the ideal courtier was never unmasked.39
In a similar vein, the little known Italian moralist Don Pio Rossi (1581–
1667), an aristocratic friar from Piacenza, observed in his moral lexicon Convito morale per gli etici, economici, e politici (The Moral Banquet for Ethicists,
Economists and Politicians, 1639), ‘most useful to he who reads, writes, teaches,
governs, and Rules’ (‘utilissimo a chi legge, scrive, insegna, governa, Impera’),
that
Questo è vn secolo d’apparenza, & si va in maschera tutto l’anno. Pur
che altri appara, non si cura d’essere da douero. […] Pare hoggidì, che
chi non sa adulare, mordere, e simulare, che chi non sa auuanzare con la
dispressione, e sorgere con la sommersione altrui, vaglia nulla: sia nulla.40
(This is an age of appearances, and one wears a mask every day of the year.
As long as one appears otherwise, one does not take care to be so in fact
[…]. It seems that, these days, he who does not know how to flatter, snipe,
and feign; he who does not know how to advance by pushing others down
and to rise by means of submerging others, is worth nothing: is nothing.)
39
40
p. 71 and chap. ii.26. The issue of appearances in Castiglione is explored in depth by Giulio
Ferroni, ‘ “Sprezzatura” e simulazione’, in La Corte e il ‘Cortegiano’, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni,
1980), i: La scena del testo, ed. Carlo Ossola, pp. 119–147.
As Peter Burke suggests in The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995), p. 31: ‘courtier is itself such a role, and one which was becoming
institutionalized into what Castiglione himself calls a ‘profession’ (ii.10), in other words
an art or discipline (arte e disciplina).’ See also Stephen J. Greenblatt’s discussion of
Castiglione’s The Courtier in his Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 38: ‘Castiglione offers not a paradigm of man’s
freedom, but a model for the formation of an artificial identity; his courtier is an actor
completely wedded to his role’.
Pio Rossi, Convito morale per gli etici, economici e politici (Venezia: Appresso i Guerigli,
first part published 1639; second part 1657), i, chap. ‘Secolo corrotto’, p. 428. For more
information on Rossi, see Albano Biondi, ‘Il Convito di Don Pio Rossi: Società chiusa e
corte ambigua’, in La Corte e il ‘Cortegiano’, ii: Un modello Europeo, ed. Adriano Prosperi,
pp. 93–112.
277
As Elias insists, then, the royal court developed increasingly performative
and theatricalized codes of behavior that demanded mastery from its members. It can thus be defined as society of performance—a cultural and political
arena of continual self-dramatization in front of one’s peers and superiors. In
the words of Jeroen Duindam, ‘the absolute ruler and the nobility unknowingly
acted out a tableau vivant of the civilizing process’.41 In this institutional configuration, where self-representation was crucial for both obtaining and retaining
power, good manners, hospitality, politeness, and gift-giving became the primary gestures of that power.
If we return now to Cicognini’s drama, we find a scene in the play’s very
first act during which the king attempts to bestow honors upon Don Gastone
and Don Merichex, an action that illustrates Elias’s formulations about the
sociology of power relations at court. What we notice immediately, however,
is that the social and commercial exchange (or gift-giving) is here reversed—it
is the king’s subject, Don Gastone, who gives his sovereign a considerable sum
of money, not vice versa:
Conseruo in questa Ducea gran quantità d’oro, quale appresso di me
infruttuoso rimane, pur troppo mi è noto, che nelle passate guerre l’Errario Regio fu in parte suiscerato dal suo tesoro, supplico la m.v. si degni
per mano d’un suo seruo ricevere in tributo vn mezo million d’oro, che
con douuta humiltà le presenta il più fido Vassallo della sua Corte.
i.12
(In this Duchy I guard a large amount of gold—which, in my keeping,
remains without use. Unfortunately, it is known to me that during the
recent wars the royal treasury was plundered of part of its wealth. I beg
of Your Highness that he deign to receive, from the hand of one of his
servants, a gift of half a million in gold, which with all due humility is
presented to Him by the most faithful Vassal of his Court.)
It is not that subjects never gave gifts to their patrons: on the contrary, courtiers
who could not offer a worthy gift to the prince would not go far. This scene, however, is revealing in that it highlights how this sovereign’s gestures and actions
(which, according to Elias, should mark him as a unique individual entitled to
hold power over his courtiers) fail to impress his peerless status upon his subjects. If, for Elias, gift-giving confirms a power imbalance between dependent
41
Jeroen Duindam, Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early European Court (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 166.
278
korneeva
and superior and, far from representing a purely economic exchange, affirms
the exchangers’ status, identity, and credibility, Don Gastone’s gesture puts an
end to the patron-dependent relationship since the king fails to perform appropriately the ritual of gift and counter-gift. Indeed, rather than produce a gift in
return, the king immediately passes Don Gastone’s gift to Don Merichex, clearly
demonstrating that he cares little about the well-being of his impoverished
state. Indeed, this scene presents us with a subject who is a better caretaker
of his kingdom than is his king.
Though apparently incapable of exchanging gifts in the usual, accepted
manner, the king still recognises his obligation to reciprocate Don Gastone’s gift
in some form; he thus attempts to confer an honorific title upon Don Gastone’s
son in exchange:
rè
d. gast.
rè
d. gast.
rè
D. Gastone hauete figliouli?
Vno mio Rè, e Celio si chiama.
Di chè età?
Non ha ancora compito il sesto anno.
Sarà Celio nostro Cavallarizzo maggiore.
i.12
(king
d. gast.
king
d. gast.
king
Don Gastone, do you have children?
I have one, my king, and his name is Celio.
How old is he?
He is not yet six years old.
Celio will be our Senior Horse Master.)
The king’s ability to reciprocate is thwarted, however, when Don Gastone explains his error in attempting to confer this honour upon a child:
d. gast. Favore al certo non meritato, ma vaglia a dire il vero, ò Signore, come potrà così tenera mano reggere il freno di bizzaro
destriero? come potrà Celio mio con fanciullesco fianco premerli il dorso? questo è honore, che a sperimentato Caualiero
s’aspetta, questa è carica, che all’adolescenza, non che alla
puerilità si adatti; Il zelo del buon seruitio di v.m. m’innanimisce a parlare con disinteressata libertà.
rè
Fingo, che anco a gl’infanti non si conferiscono honori; Chi
adunque giudicareste habile a tale carica?
d. gast. Già che mi chiede v.m. dico, che giudico proportionata la
carica al valore di D. Merichex.
rè
279
Sia adunque D. Merichex nostro Caualarizo maggiore.
i.12
(d. gast. This is certainly an unmerited favor—it is worth telling the
truth, my Lord—how will such a soft hand control the reigns of
a crazed steed? How will my Celio, with his child’s hips, press
upon the horse’s flank? This is an honour hoped for by a young
Knight; this is a duty better suited to a young man than to a
child. The zeal of Your Highness’s good servant spurs me to
speak with impartial liberty.
king
I imagine that one doesn’t confer honors upon an infant. Who,
therefore, would you judge able to take on this charge?
d. gast. Since you have asked me, Your Highness, I say that I judge the
task in proportion to the valor of D. Merichex.
king
D. Merichex, then, will be our Senior Horse Master.)
In Elias’s scenario, as we have seen, the mechanism by which power operated
in early modern court societies was representational in character and was
thus heavily dependent on the extent to which others recognized it. We might
therefore suggest that what makes Pietro d’Aragona a poor monarch is that
he fails to represent himself properly to his subjects and to deal appropriately
with his courtiers’ questioning of his social superiority. The king here explicitly
contributes to an all but complete reversal of power in soliciting and then
deferring to Don Gastone’s judgment above Pietro’s own. The court in Il Don
Gastone thus becomes an arena in which power is continuously renegotiated—
but not to the king’s advantage, though at times by his own hand.
Elias’s insights into the centrality of theatricality to the construction of successful social and political agency in the early modern court can productively
be brought into conversation with recent critical assessments of early modern political thought that suggest that Baroque rulers regularly displayed their
power theatrically. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong were the first to point out
that it was by means of court spectacles and public festivities that princes and
the privileged élite exhibited their prominent status and attempted to reinforce their self-mythologizing via ostentatious displays, exaltations of political
power, and splendid spectacle.42 Jean-Marie Apostolidès compared the role
42
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975); Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–
1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
280
korneeva
of the king to that of an actor in a heroic drama, in which courtiers were at
once audience and secondary players,43 and Stephen Greenblatt explored the
theatrical means by which English Renaissance rulers and historical figures created their ‘selves’.44 Indeed, the oft-quoted response of Queen Elizabeth to a
parliamentary petition for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (‘we princes
[…] are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world dulie observed; the
eies of manie behold our actions’), epitomizes what Greenblatt has called ‘the
whole theatrical apparatus of royal power’ and the dependence of Elizabethan
power ‘upon its privileged visibility’.45 According to Louis Marin’s compelling
study of the semiotics of French absolutism in Le portrait du roi, the representation of sovereignty in Baroque political regimes involved the theatricalization
of public action and its resulting effects.46 Even Jürgen Habermas, working
within a different framework and distinguishing between the forms of publicity
that set the early modern period apart from the eighteenth century, suggested
in a somewhat similar vein that the exercise of sovereignty involved the public
display of power before the people. Monarchs and their peerage ‘represented
their lordship not for but ‘before’ the people’ (‘sie [die Herrscher] repräsentieren ihre Herrschaft, statt für das Volk, ‘vor’ dem Volk’).47 A sovereign thus
established his authority via a mode of public self-representation that rendered
the invisible source of his political power visible in physical—bodily—form, a
type of ceremonial representation that marks the body of the lord with what
Habermas calls the mystical ‘aura’ of his own authority. It is worth noting that
the English and French monarchies were, however, scarcely different from any
other monarchy from almost any historical era in their reliance on the application of the arts of theater to the projection of kingship.48
43
44
45
46
47
48
Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis xiv (Paris:
Minuit, 1981), p. 8. See also his Le Prince sacrifié: Théâtre et politique au temps de Louis xiv
(Paris: Minuit, 1985).
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Id., ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry iv and Henry v’, in
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural
Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 44.
Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981).
Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie
der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage (Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp, 1990). English translations of this text are from Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas
Burger with Frederick Lawrence (repr. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1989), p. 8.
See, for example, John Huxtable Elliott, ‘Power and Propaganda in the Spain of Philip iv’,
281
These critical perspectives complicate Elias’s picture of court society and
shed light on the fact that when politics, like all the world, was a stage, Baroque
princes saw themselves on a rostrum before spectators and understood themselves and their activities in terms of the theatricality of their roles. In light of
these broader insights, the specific scenes in Il Don Gastone of the king’s lack of
self-control and his subjects’ absent recognition of his authority—not to mention the numerous other critiques he receives—suggest that one of his failings
is ineffective role-playing. Let us therefore see whether there are other aesthetic
criteria of the performance of sovereignty that Cicognini’s king of Aragon fails
to satisfy.
A Theater of Dissimulation
The most influential phenomena to contribute to and reflect on the increasingly performative codes of behavior in early modern political regimes were,
according to Elias, courtesy manuals and advice books for princes. If one of
the cornerstones of social and power relations at court was self-control, the
other governing principle—upon which contemporary manners books rather
insisted and which was closely connected to both the manipulation of appearances and the theatricality of political behavior—was the art of dissimulation.
Indeed, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been known as ‘the age
of dissimulation’,49 a feature of the period that figures prominently in contemporary courtesy books and in literature on politics and statecraft (perhaps
because, as we have seen, politics during the same period took on a decidedly
theatrical dimension). It is interesting to note that the decade of the 1640s—
precisely when Cicognini’s play was first performed—saw the climax of the
debate over dissimulation and its correlative, simulation.50
49
50
in id., Spain and its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (London: Yale University Press, 1989),
pp. 162–188 on how symbols were manipulated to enhance the power and majesty of Philip
iv. On the Italian context, see Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe: La festa politica a Firenze
e Venezia in età rinascimentale (Venice: Marsilio, 1996).
See Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, p. 5. See also Rosario Villari, Elogio
della dissimulazione: La lotta politica nel Seicento (Rome: Laterza, 1987); Perez Zagorin,
Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 3: ‘Although the term dissimulation occurs somewhat more commonly in the literature than simulation, the two are simply different sides of the same coin.
[…] Dissimulatio signified dissembling, feigning, concealing, or keeping secret. Simulatio
282
korneeva
Of course, Niccolò Machiavelli had already argued (in the famed eighteenth
chapter of Il principe (The Prince, 1513), a book which has been a vademecum for
tyranny ever since) that a prerequisite for the virtuous prince was the ability
to manipulate appearances. Machiavelli asked his prince to play his part with
care; to lie yet to seem to tell the truth. A ruler, he argued, must be strong like
a lion and clever like a fox, and a key element of this cleverness is the ability
to be a ‘great feigner and dissembler’ (‘gran simulatore e dissimulatore’).51 A
politician may be successful while entirely lacking in admirable qualities, ‘but
it is very necessary that he seem to have them’ (‘ma è bene necessario parere
di averle’, my italics).52 Dissimulation had thus long been thought of as an
inescapable component of the political world.
Many Seicento works on dissimulation extended this Machiavellian principle beyond the conduct of princes to that of other members of the body politic.
What had originally been characteristic of princely conduct thus became the
standard modus operandi (or, to quote Castiglione, the regula universalissima
or universal rule) of other groups within the state apparatus.53 Jon Snyder has
pointed out that, ‘as a practice of self-censorship, dissimulation assisted those
who sought not to reveal or disclose anything of their own interiority, but were
at the same time intent upon not uttering any untruth to others.’54 He further
explains that ‘[d]issimulation at court was a supremely self-conscious art of
producing an image of oneself for others through language, gesture, and action,
among other things, even if such a representation was intended to disclose little or nothing about the courtier’s true intentions […]’.55 Castiglione’s courtiers
famously named this principle of hypocrisy-by-design, coining the neologism
sprezzatura—that is, a certain cultivated nonchalance; a masking artifice that
makes everything appear spontaneous and effortless.56
51
52
53
54
55
56
also meant feigning or a falsely assumed appearance, deceit, hypocrisy, pretense, or insincerity. The two words might therefore be used interchangeably, each denoting deception
with the further possible connotation of lying’.
Nicolò Machiavelli, Il principe, in id., Opere, 2 vols., ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: EinaudiGallimard, 1997), vol. i, chap. 18, p. 166.
Ibid.
Castiglione’s regula universalissima for court behavior consists in avoiding ‘quanto più si
po, e come un asperissimo e pericoloso scoglio, la affettazione; e per dire forse una nova
parola, usar in ogni caso una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte, e dimostri, ciò che si
fa e dice, venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi’. Cf. Castiglione, Cortegiano, i.26,
p. 81.
Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, p. 6.
Ibid., p. 75.
Cortegiano i.26 is an important chapter for the praise of apparent effortlessness (‘certa
283
But if, for Castiglione’s courtiers, engagement in a kind of theatrical selfpresentation (both simulative and dissimulative) was the convention of a gracious court game, in the new historical constellation of Seicento Italy, wearing masks and disguises became an indispensable ingredient of life for other
members of the political élite: courtiers, secretaries, bureaucrats, counselors,
ambassadors, and spies. Indeed, Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), a counselor to the
Venetian Republic and both a practitioner and a theorist of politics, openly
recommended hypocrisy, describing himself as a chameleon that takes on the
color of its surroundings:
Ego eius ingenii sum, ut, velut Chamalaeon, a conversantibus mores sumam; versum, quos ab occultis, et tristibus haurio, invitus incordio: hilares et apertos sponte ac libere recipio: personam coactus fero; licet in
Italia nemo sine ea esse possit.57
(My character is such that, like the Chameleon, I imitate the behavior
of those amongst whom I find myself. Thus if I am amongst people
who are reserved and gloomy I become, despite myself, unfriendly. I
respond openly and freely to people who are cheerful and uninhibited.
I am compelled to wear a mask. Perhaps there is nobody who can survive
in Italy without one.)
If we read the king’s behavior in Cicognini’s play against the backdrop of Machiavelli’s and Castiglione’s recommendations to princes and courtiers as well
as of Sarpi’s self-portrait, another reason for Il Don Gastone’s representation
of the sovereign as dissolute becomes apparent: the king rejects the cardinal
rule of highly theatricalized courtly etiquette, the ars simulandi et dissimulandi. In the gift-exchange scene discussed above, the king—irritated by Don
Gastone’s spontaneous act of generosity that is, apparently, devoid of personal
ambition—claims to dissimulate:
57
sprezzatura’, or ‘sprezzata disinvoltura’). For further discussion on this point, see Frank
Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 93–95.
Paolo Sarpi, Letter to Jacques Gillot, 12 May 1609, quoted in David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi:
Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
p. 119. For more detailed information on Sarpi, see Filippo De Vivo, ‘Paolo Sarpi and the
Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice’, Media History 11 (2005), 37–51.
284
korneeva
Superbo è D. Gastone, la sua humiltà è la superbia stessa, convien simulare. Accetto di buon grado il vostro dono, perche ne vediate gli’effetti,
ecco che ne dispongo, come Padrone; dono à D. Merichex il mezo millione
con altrettanto appresto.
i.12
([Aside] D. Gastone is proud, his humility is pride itself—it is fitting to
feign.
[To D. Gastone] I willingly accept your gift; so that you can see its effect,
see how I dispose of it, as a Lord: I give to D. Merichex the half million
with the same eagerness.)
With these words, Pietro d’Aragona openly acknowledges theatrical artifice,
whereas a skilled dissimulator does exactly the opposite, announcing nothing and allowing no one to know for sure whether a mask is or is not being
used. The king, in contrast, signals his own role-playing, pointedly exposing
the mechanisms of theater at work and reminding the audience of the circumstances of performance. In a society in which each member is an actor
who pursues strategies of covert action and theatrical deception, Cicognini’s
king exhibits Castiglione’s disgrazia dell’affettazione, the cardinal sin of affectation.58
The king’s inability to rely on his skills as a dissimulator and on his dramatic
self-representation becomes even more apparent when we see not only that
he does not (or cannot) properly perform his royal role, but also that he makes
his subjects play his role instead. At the outset of the play, for example, when
Pietro first arrives at Don Gastone’s duchy, he asks his servant to pretend to be
a king in order to deceive Scappino and to discover why Don Gastone had fled
the court for the country. Later in the play, unable to seduce Donna Violante by
threat or force, he commissions Don Merichex to arrange her seduction. During
the next two acts of the play, therefore, the king increasingly becomes a mere
spectator of a well-staged performance that is orchestrated almost entirely by
Don Merichex.
58
Castiglione, Cortegiano, ii.7, pp. 122–123: ‘Voglio adunque che ’l nostro cortegiano in ciò
che egli faccia o dice usi alcune regole universali, le quali io estimo che brevemente
contengano tutto quello che a me s’appartien di dire; e per la prima e più importante fugga
[…] sopra tutto l’affettazione. Appresso consideri ben che cosa è quella, che egli fa o dice,
e ’l loco dove la fa, in presenzia di cui, a che tempo, la causa perché la fa, la età sua, la
professione, il fine dove tende, e i mezzi che a quello condur lo possono’.
285
The eclipsing of the king as a model royal figure is particularly evident when
we compare him to the character of Don Merichex, a man skilled at wearing
masks and at prudently simulating and dissimulating. Don Merichex is a hero
with a particularly theatrical vision of reality who sees himself and others as
theatrical fictions defined by outward appearances. His dramatic sense of life
is immediately apparent: when introducing himself to Don Gastone for the first
time, he describes his prior life as a tragedia, thus portraying himself as a selfaware performer in his own drama:
Non vorrei, ò Signore, che la miserabile historia de’ miei funesti accidenti
turbasse le delizie dell’anima vostra, che nel resto, il narrar la mia tragedia
mi darà doppio contento, l’uno perche vi ubbidisco, e l’altro perche il
raccontare i suoi travagli à Prencipe Generoso è di sollievo al tormento.
i.4, my italics
(I do not wish, dear Sir, that the sad history of my woeful mishaps disturb
the delights of your soul, though for the rest, telling my tragedy will
give me double pleasures: one because I am obeying you, and the other
because describing one’s travails to a Generous Prince is to relieve one’s
torment.)
His words display an acute awareness of and radical conviction that Baroque
man was not just similar to a character on the theatrical stage—he was in
fact identical to an actor on stage and viewed both himself and the world as
a theatrical fiction.59
When receiving the king’s orders to exile Don Gastone and to arrange the
seduction of Donna Violante, Don Merichex is torn between his loyalty to his
friend and to his prince:
Oh Dio, ed a qual segno son io ridotto? ò devo mancar al giuramento dato
al Rè, ò tradire nell’honore l’amico, se io voglio osseruare, come Caualiero,
e forza ch’io manchi, come traditore; non posso preparare la cura alle
59
On the flourishing of the theatrum mundi topos in early modern writing and the Baroque
fascination with the theatricality of the world, see Ernst Robert Curtius’s foundational
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press,
1990), pp. 138–144. See also the excellent surveys by Lynda G. Christian, Theatrum mundi:
The History of an Idea (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 150–192; Frances A. Yates, Theatre of
the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans
le théâtre sur la scène française du xviie siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1981), p. 341.
286
korneeva
dolcezze di Sua Maestà, ch’io non fabrichi la tomba della riputatione di
D. Gastone.
ii.9
(Oh God, to what act am I reduced? Either I must break my oath to the
King, or betray my friend’s honor. If I want to keep my oath, like a Knight,
I am forced to break faith, like a traitor; I cannot attend to His Majesty’s
pleasures unless I build a tomb for D. Gastone’s reputation.)
He thus struggles to make ethical sense of the issues and to act with both justice
and humanity:
O tormentato Don Merichex: in qual tenebroso laberinto ti sei ciecamente condotto? S’io penso alla promessa fatta al Rè, sento inuitarmi
all’osservanza; s’io mi ricordo dell’obligationi con D. Gastone, mi sento
sconsigliare, il giuramento mi sforza, il tradimento mi respinge, l’autorità
Reggia mi comanda l’amicizia non lo comporta, mancar di fede al Rè
non posso; machinar contro l’honore di D. Gastone non deuo, l’essere
spergiuro mi spaventa, tradir l’amico mi vitupera: oh promessa, oh tradimento, ò giuramento, ò amicitia, ò Rè, ò Don Gastone, ò fierissimi tiranni
dell’anima mia, così mi tormentate? così m’affliggete.
ii.9
(O tormented Don Merichex! Into what shadowy labyrinth have you
blindly allowed yourself to be led? If I think of the promise I made to the
King, I feel compelled to keep it; if I recall my obligations to D. Gastone,
I feel advised against it. The oath binds me, the betrayal repels me, the
authority of the State commands me, friendship does not permit it, I
cannot break faith with the King, I must not conspire against the honour
of D. Gastone, becoming a liar frightens me, betraying a friend vilifies
me. Oh promise, oh betrayal, either oath or friendship, either King or
D. Gastone, oh haughtiest tyrants of my soul, how you torment me! How
you afflict me!)
While this audience-directed, emotionally-charged soliloquy reveals the internal conflict and emotional turmoil of the character, his subsequent actions
show an extraordinary mastery of self-dramatization. Indeed, his thoughts and
feelings remain completely inaccessible both to other characters and to the
play’s spectators until the very last scene. His actions thus put into practice
Pietro Bembo’s advice from the second book of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, which
287
states that nothing should ever be said unless it has been well thought through
beforehand and that one should never trust anyone, not even a dear friend,
to the extent that he ‘communicate without reservation all one’s thoughts to
him’.60
Don Merichex is a complex character who is conscious of the degree to
which the inner self reflects the outer, public self in its daily interactions with
one’s sovereign and fellow courtiers. Indeed, he reminds himself, ‘remember
that, with regards to one’s actions, one must think of the end result, and
that breaking faith with the King has as its end the honour of a friend, and
that keeping faith has as its outcome that friend’s shame’ (‘[r]iccordati, che
nelle attioni si deue pensare al fine, e che il mancar di fede al Rè hà per fine
l’honor dell’amico, e che osservarui fede ha per scoppo le sue vergogne,’ ii.9). In
addition to his status as savvy central character and his vital role as problemsolver, Don Merichex is a stage manager, a role through which his character
comes to compete with that of the king, and through which the performance of
an onstage courtier comes to echo and challenge the ‘performance’ that is state
ritual. Don Merichex, in fact, is always in control of the monarch’s movements
on stage, as well as of the entries and exits of the other characters. Contrary
to what we might expect given the title of the play, Don Merichex—not Don
Gastone—is thus the true protagonist of Cicognini’s drama.
Yet another aspect of theatricalization in Baroque political regimes is the
dependence of princes on their audiences. Indeed, Don Pio Rossi emphasized
‘living a theatrical life’ (‘vivere una vita da teatro’) among the ‘many miseries
which accompany the greatness of the prince’, precisely because the great
were always ‘in the view of a world of spectators’ (‘alla veduta d’un mondo di
spettatori’):
La Grandezza trà le molte miserie, che l’accompagnano, ha questa non
inferiore ad ogn’altra; di viuere vna vita da teatro: percioche esposti i
Grandi continuamente sono alla veduta d’vn mondo di spettatori: & ogni
minimo loro portamento è specolato da tutti, con ogni più critica diligenza, come di quelli, che sono posti sopra ’l Candelliero dell’Eminenza,
ò sopra la colonna delle grandezze per illustrare tutta vna casa, e tutta una
Prouincia.61
(The condition of the great: among the many miseries that accompany
her, the one that is inferior to no other is that of living a theatrical life, due
60
61
Castiglione, Cortegiano, ii.29, p. 236.
Pio Rossi, Convito, ii, chap. ‘Grandezza Regale’, p. 175.
288
korneeva
to which Great men are continually exposed to the glare of a world of
spectators, and their most insignificant action is watched by all with the
most critical diligence, like those who are placed upon the Chandelier of
Eminence, or on top of the column of the great to represent a whole house,
and a whole Province.)
As David Scott Kastan has observed, ‘[a] spectacular sovereignty works to subject its audience to—and through—the royal power on display, captivating,
in several senses, its onlookers. But this theatrical strategy of what Stephen
Greenblatt has called “privileged visibility” carries with it considerable risks.
Significantly, it makes power contingent upon the spectators’ assent […].’62 The
monarch must, in other words, continually play to his subjects, subjecting himself to their admiration and showing that he takes seriously his responsibility to
represent performatively—theatrically—his unique status and peerless power
as evidence of his leadership ability.
The numerous critiques of Pietro d’Aragona’s rule reveal that Il Don Gastone
is not merely an expression of aesthetic concern about the centrality of theatricality to the construction of successful social and political agency. Instead,
what makes this king a tyrant is his inappropriate liberation from the restraints
of popular opinion—he does not care about the response of his audience. Scappino (who, despite being a lower-class character demonstrates a good deal of
moral wisdom) makes a revealing comparison between the king and his master
(Don Gastone) that underlines the king’s indifference to popular opinion:
Don Gastone è persona honorata, il Rè d’Aragona non hà altro pensiero,
che compiacere à sè stesso. Don Gastone è Caualiero d’azzioni Illustri,
il Rè è solo Rè di nome, ma perche pure è il Rè, e mescolando l’autorità
Reggia con la Tirannide, e facendendosi vn decotto al fuoco delle opinioni
del Mondo scema due terzi dell’huomo da bene, e dell’altro terzo se ne
caua vn siroppo di furfante.
i.7, my italics
(Don Gastone is an honorable person; the King of Aragon has no other
thought than to please himself. Don Gastone is a Knight of Illustrious
Actions, the King is only King in name, but precisely because he is King
and confuses the authority of the State with Tyranny, and, if he were
brewing himself a herbal remedy from of the opinions of the world, he would
62
David Scott Kastan, ‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of
Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 459–475, esp. p. 466.
289
discard the two thirds coming from virtuous men and obtain his syrup
from the other, good-for-nothing third.)
When Scappino, after having discovered that he had been speaking to the
king in disguise, asks Pietro d’Aragona to forgive him for having spoken so
improperly, the king replies that ‘the great do not care about the injuries of
buffoons’ (‘I grandi non curano l’ingiurie de buffoni’, i.8). In addition to his
refusal to role play according to the established rules of courtly etiquette; his
inability to manipulate the visual and verbal symbols of power; and his subjects’
lack of recognition of his authority, therefore, the king’s chief flaw—what, in
other words, makes him a tyrant in the eyes of his subjects and of the play’s
audience—is his indifference to his own public image and to the popular
opinion of it—and, by extension, of his status and ability as a ruler. If, during the
Baroque age, the theater metaphor was a governing mode of almost all forms
of human behavior—social, political, and aesthetic—Cicognini’s king’s failing
is that he forgets that theater and, in particular, the performance of politics is
always dependent on its audience. The theatrical metaphor, therefore, has here
ceased to describe political authority.
The Dramaturgy of the Spectator
If early modern theater was a medium for the circulation of information,
ideas, and opinion formation in particular concerning political institutions and
events, what conclusions can be drawn about the explicit or implied meaning(s) of Cicognini’s drama for its seventeenth-century audiences? Why did
its performance of sovereignty and the aesthetics of power make it appeal
widely to different kinds of publics? How can we explain the interest of the
eighteenth-century reading public in this court-focused play and the related—
and immense—editorial success of Il Don Gastone? One answer to these questions could be that, by exposing royal sovereignty as empty, by revealing the
monarch’s position as precarious, and by showing the king’s subjects assuming his role, the play provides an astute illustration of the historical transition from what Jürgen Habermas termed the ‘representative’ public sphere
(in which monarchs represented their authoritative power and unchallenged
sovereignty to quiescent subjects) to the bourgeois public sphere (in which private individuals come together to confront and problematize political authority). According to Habermas, the king’s subjects under absolutism were not
rational and self-conscious—they were passive spectators of a political scene
that was orchestrated by the monarch and subjected to the ‘aura’ of his God-
290
korneeva
given authority.63 In this scenario, the swapping of roles between king and
courtiers in Cicognini’s play and the latters’ evolution into genuine political
actors might be linked to a decisive event: the emergence of a radically new
kind of public.
It may be helpful at this point to rehearse some of the prominent aspects
of Habermas’s discussion, particularly as it relates to the model of the public sphere. In Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 1962, a work of social and
political theory that is one of the foundational texts for current debates on the
public sphere),64 the German philosopher and cultural theorist provided an
account of the genesis of a public sphere that embraced private citizens who
engaged in rational-critical debate (offentliches Räsonnement) on the political
norms of the state. In Habermas’s scenario, this ‘authentic’ public sphere established itself in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between absolute
state and bourgeois society.
Habermas’s influential definition of the public sphere helps us unravel the
significance of Cicognini’s drama, allowing us to consider it as a sustained
illustration of his account of the new public that was just beginning to articulate
its distinctiveness from past audiences. Indeed, by watching onstage characters
move from subjecta to reasoning individuals; from receivers of regulations to
interlocutors with authority, the spectators of Il Don Gastone were compelled to
experience vicariously a particular kind of identity formation. By empathically
identifying with the play’s dramatic heroes, who engage critically in public
63
64
Habermas’s contention is confirmed by a brilliant aphorism of Pio Rossi, who compared
the great to the actors who fill the stage, leaving commoners to watch them from the dark
of the parterre: ‘Vn gran torchio leua il lume à i piccioli: E le picciole candele non vagliono
gran fatto à rischiarar le tenebre, se i maggiori non s’ecclissano’. Convito, i, chap. ‘Grande
Primate’, p. 214.
For critical discussion of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and its impact on literary
studies, see Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture
and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999); Jan
Bloemendal and Arjan van Dixhoorn, ‘Early Modern Literary Cultures and Public Opinion’,
in Jan Bloemendal, Arjan van Dixhoorn, and Elsa Strietman (eds.), Literary Cultures and
Public Opinion in the Low Countries, 1450–1650 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 267–291.
On the importance of theater to crafting the public sphere cf. especially Logan J. Connors,
Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: Philosophes, Anti-Philosophes, and Polemical Theatre (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012) and Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre:
Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press,
1999).
291
discussions and take on the role of active political actors, audience members
were invited to project their own ability to judge matters usually considered
arcane mysteries of the state. Even though we must be cautious about drawing
far-reaching conclusions based upon a single playwright’s body of work, my
analysis of Cicognini’s drama and the history of Il Don Gastone’s reception
suggest that the play could well have exercised a shaping influence on the
formation of rational and active spectatorship. Moreover, Cicognini’s drama
reveals that features of the ‘mature’ Habermasian bourgeois public sphere were
anticipated well before the Enlightenment, and Il Don Gastone can therefore be
considered a theatrical precursor to this societal shift.65
If, from one perspective, Cicognini’s play called into being critical and active
consumers of cultural products, from an alternative perspective, the play is
symptomatic of how the aesthetics of power and the dramatic treatment of
royalty have been fashioned with respect to the rise of this new, potentially
powerful and adjudicating public, and in response to this new public’s horizon
of expectations. Indeed, one can read the happy ending and the final redemption of the king as the playwright’s pandering to the audience’s dissatisfaction
with tragic conclusions.66 The redemption of the tyrant, however, also implies
65
66
Although Habermas located the genesis of the modern institution of ‘the public’ in late
seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century England and France, insisting on the geographical specificity of his claim, literary scholars and historians of cultural and political
communication have found evidence of his ‘public sphere’ in early modernity. See Peter
Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003); Massimo Rospocher, ‘Beyond the Public Sphere: A Historical Transition’, in id. (ed.),
Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna: Il
Mulino; Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2012), pp. 9–28. To the best of my knowledge, however, there are no critical studies that explore the role played by Italian theater in shaping
the emergence of a critically productive spectatorship.
One example of the declining taste for tragic plots in the mid-sixteenth century is the influential statement of dramatist and theater theorist Angelo Ingegneri, who claimed that ‘le
tragedie, lasciando da canto che così poche se ne leggono che non abbiano importantissimi e inescusabili mancamenti, onde talora divengono anco irrappresentabili, sono
spettacoli malinconici, alla cui vista malamente si accomoda l’occhio disioso di dilettazione’. Maria Luisa Doglio (ed.), Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare
le favole sceniche (Modena: Panini, 1989 [1598]), p. 7. Also revealing is the scene from the
fifth chapter of Giambattista Marino’s Adone (1623), in which the homonymous hero falls
asleep well before the end of the magnificent tragic performance that Venus stages for her
lover. For a detailed analysis of this scene, see Franco Vazzoler, ‘La spettacolarizzazione
292
korneeva
the success the characters’ agency (and, by extension, that of the audience)
enjoys in bringing the tyrant to justice and, ultimately, in re-negotiating rather
than simply accepting the sovereign’s monopoly on self-representation.
Given the centrality of reliance on the spectator for successful political
action and the paramount importance assigned to the experience of a receptive
subject in Il Don Gastone, it is furthermore possible to locate in Cicognini’s theater the emergence of a dramatic aesthetic that is attentive to public response.
My analysis shows that this kind of aesthetics—one that is typically associated with eighteenth-century dramatic poetics67—in fact emerged precisely
at the moment of transition from court theater to public playhouse. Of course,
there have already been numerous attempts to emphasise the centrality of the
spectator even before this moment,68 but it seems that only under the pen of a
‘transitional’ playwright like Cicognini does the aesthetic start to take shape in
a practical way on stage.
Ultimately, the interpretation of Il Don Gastone undertaken in these pages
reveals that Cicognini’s wide appeal to different kinds of audiences—or publics—and his fame well into the eighteenth century was due only in part to
his ability to ‘tempt with novelties the listless taste of his spectators’ (‘lusin-
67
68
del mito fra manierismo e barocco sulle scene italiane’, in Valentina Nider (ed.), Teatri
del Mediterraneo. Riscritture e ricodificazioni fra ’500 e ’600 (Trento: Università degli Studi
di Trento, 2004), pp. 75–87. On Cinquecento tragedy see the excellent essay by Antonella
Calzavara, ‘L’“amor soverchio” e lo “sfrenato sdegno”: Rassegna di testi e studi sulla tragedia italiana del Cinquecento (con un’appendice secentesca) (1970–1993)’, Lettere italiane
46 (1994), 642–676.
See, for example, Hans Robert Jauss, ‘La teoria della ricezione: Identificazione retrospettiva dei suoi antecedenti storici’, in Robert C. Holub (ed.), Teoria della ricezione (Torino:
Einaudi, 1989), pp. 3–26. See also my ‘Il pubblico teatrale nel Genio buono e il genio cattivo
di Carlo Goldoni’, Italian Studies 70 (2015), 93–117.
Theories that stressed the necessity of providing satisfaction to the audience were postulated in an Italian context by Giambattista Guarini, Giraldi Cinthio, Angelo Ingegneri,
and Leone de’ Sommi in particular. Anna Tedesco has recently linked Cicognini’s dramatic
aesthetics (which emphasises keeping the public pleased and entertained) to the shaping influence of Lope de Vega’s treatise El Arte nuevo de facer commedias en este tiempo
(The New Art of Writing Plays in This Age, 1609, first printed in Italy in 1611), which oriented Italian playwrights towards a new kind of dramaturgy that recommended against
the Aristotelian rules in favour of a more public-oriented paradigm. See her ‘“Capriccio”,
“Comando”, “Gusto del pubblico” e “Genio del luogo” nelle premesse ai libretti per musica a
metà del Seicento’, in Giulia Poggi and Maria Grazia Profeti (eds.), Norme per lo spettacolo,
norme per lo spettatore. Teoria e prassi del teatro intorno all’“Arte Nuevo”: Atti del seminario
internazionale, Firenze, 19–24 ottobre 2009 (Florence: Alinea, 2001), pp. 345–358.
293
gare colla novità lo svogliato gusto degli spettatori’)69 and to his play’s dramatic effectiveness, moral resonance, and treatment of sovereignty—one that,
unusually, both critiques and affirms the current political regime. Instead, the
overriding reason for Il Don Gastone’s success and the principal cause of its
adaptability to different theatrical contexts lies in the fact that the play is a true
site of public making: Cicognini’s aim was explicitly political and was designed
to compel the audience to recognise its own centrality in social, theatrical, and
political domains alike, and to raise consciousness among the public that it is,
itself, the ultimate repository of power.
Further Reading
Antonucci, Fausta, ‘Spunti tematici e rielaborazione di modelli spagnoli nel Don Gastone di Moncada di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’, in Maria Grazia Profeti (ed.), Tradurre, riscrivere, mettere in scena (Florence: Alinea, 1996), pp. 65–84
Cancedda, Flavia, and Silvia Castelli, Per una bibliografia di Giacinto Andrea Cicognini:
Successo teatrale e fortuna editoriale di un drammaturgo del Seicento (Florence:
Alinea, 2001)
Calzavara, Antonella. ‘L’“amor soverchio” e lo “sfrenato sdegno”: Rassegna di testi e studi
sulla tragedia italiana del Cinquecento (con un’appendice secentesca) (1970–1993)’,
Lettere italiane 46 (1994), 642–676
Doglio, Federico, ‘La tragedia barocca’, in id., Il teatro tragico italiano: Storia e testi del
teatro tragico in Italia (Parma: Guanda, 1960), pp. lxxix–clxiv
Greenblatt, Stephen J., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Sberlati, Francesco, La ragione barocca: Politica e letteratura nell’Italia del Seicento
(Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2006)
Snyder, Jon R., Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
Zanlonghi, Giovanna, ‘La tragedia fra ludus e festa: Rassegna dei nodi problematici
delle teoriche secentesche sulla tragedia in Italia’, Comunicazioni sociali 15 (1993),
157–240
69
Crescimbeni, La bellezza della volgar poesia, p. 142.

The Political Theater and Theatrical Politics of Andrea Giacinto

Transcript

Documenti analoghi

Circolari_AGGIORNAMENTO INGLESE FILM - Padova

Mauro Buda-baritone - Le Vie Dei Mercanti

favoured by him, and wrote a fine poem on his death.11 Crescem

Wim Wenders I came to know the work of Robert Bosisio some

Frontespizio di GA CICOGNINI, L`amor vuole suoi pari, Bolo

biografia

La legge naturale nell`enciclica Caritas in veritate di

Marc Chagall - IIS "Cristoforo Colombo"

Patrizia Bottallo

Mr Bloom....Ulysses - Chapter VI - James Joyce